H. L. Mencken Quotes

“A poet over 30 is pathetic”

“Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.”

“Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”

“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

“A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.”

“On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.”

“For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together.”

“I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.”

“Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.”

“The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.”

“Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.”

“A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”

“Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”

“Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.”

“Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.”

“The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.”

“It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.”

“Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.”

“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”

“For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.”

“The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.”

“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.”

“The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.”

“There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.”